Tim Cook on Hardware, Apple’s Structure and Being ‘Simpletons’

As Apple spotlights its software with a developer release of its new Mac operating system, Mountain Lion, Tim Cook mused about other areas of Apple’s business — including closely followed hardware trends — in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Reuters

Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook speaks about the iPhone 4S at the company’s headquarters in October.

When asked about whether Apple laptops will have touch-screens, like iPads and iPhones, Mr. Cook played the “secrecy” card.

“Well, our notebooks, I wouldn’t want to answer, because that’s sort of a roadmap question, and, you know, we like to be secretive on those things,” he said at Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters.

Then he raised some doubts. “Other people have tried that with desktops, and I think to say it hasn’t caught traction is probably an understatement of the year,” he said.

Mr. Cook then picked up his iPhone, poked at the screen and called it “sort of an intimate experience.”

“Take the desktop thing. You’re parked further away from your desktop, assuming it has any kind of size at all, and it’s, you know, you should draw your own conclusion, but this kind of reach for me isn’t a terribly intuitive thing,” he said, reaching across the conference room table used by Apple’s board of directors, as if to touch a computer.

As for the topic of whether Apple’s hardware would converge as its software is doing so, Mr. Cook noted his company’s devices already have a similar look and feel, in part because Apple has a common industrial design, or ID, team. “You know, you can tell that this came from the same parent as this,” he said continuing his game of show-and-tell by pointing to various Apple products.

Apple’s corporate structure helps explain.

“We have one (industrial design) organization,” he said. “We have one hardware organization. We have one marketing organization. It’s not like we’re this big company with all these divisions that are cranking out independent products. We’re simpletons.”

Those products, of course, are enjoying record sales – and Mr. Cook said the company has plenty of runway ahead.

“We’re in this unique position of being in two markets that are in sort of a hyper-growth phase,” he said referring to the iPhone and the iPad. “And it isn’t clear to me that the hyper-growth phase goes away any time soon.”

Then, in a nod back to the news of the moment and the Mac, he said: “The PC market is clearly not in hyper growth. However, we have low share of the PC market. And so honestly, I don’t spend my nights worrying about the growth of the PC industry, because if we innovate like crazy … we should be able to grow.”